Born on January 7, 1861, in Roxbury (now part of Boston), Massachusetts,
Louise Guiney was educated at Elmhurst, a convent school in Providence, Rhode Island.
To help support her family she began contributing to various newspapers and magazines. Her poems, collected in Songs at the Start (1884) and The White Sail and Other Poems (1887), and her essays, collected in Goose Quill Papers (1885), soon attracted the attention of the Boston literary establishment, and the verse in A Roadside Harp (1893) and the essays in Monsieur Henri (1892), A Little English Gallery (1894), and Patrins (1897) brought her to the center of aesthetic life in Boston.